It had only gone well for 11 days: On April 4th the mapping mission of the Mars Global Surveyor had started in earnest, with the high gain antenna deployed, the spacecraft's instruments pointing towards Mars all the time (while the antenna tracked the Earth), and data coming to us "from a firehose", as a NASA scientist put it. But on April 15, the antenna's hinge suddenly got stuck, sending the spacecraft into a contingency mode. There are two hinges at the end of the boom that connect to the high-gain antenna. One hinge, called the azimuth hinge, moves the antenna from side to side, the other hinge up and down.

The azimuth hinge appears to have stopped moving midway between its parked and earth-tracking position. On April 19, the spacecraft was no longer in the contingency mode, and that afternoon flight controllers turned the entire spacecraft to point the high-gain telecommunications antenna toward Earth. On April 21st flight controllers moved the hinge one-half of a degree from side to side. The information from the spacecraft shows that the hinge moves freely in one direction, but it's motion appears to be obstructed in the opposite direction. (From the Status Reports of Apr. 16 to 23)

ABRIXAS' planned launch at 20:30 UTC on April 28th will also make space history: It's the first commercial launch from Kapustin Yar, a Russian launch site only used for military purposes so far. The launcher will be a Russian COSMOS rocket (that will also carry a small Italian data relay satellite), which has a good record. The unusual arrangement was part of the package deal the German space agency DLR had struck with the main contractor OHB: We tell you what we want, you deliver to us a spacecraft in orbit. Oridinarly the spacecraft gets delivered on the ground and the launch is negotiated separately.

Three German astronomical institutes will be analyzing the data ABRIXAS is supposed to deliver in the next three years. They will create a catalog of perhaps 10 000 sources in the 0.3 to 11 keV energy band (good for the planning of pointed observations for Chandra and XMM) and look for transient phenomena (such as gamma ray burster afterglows) as well. ABRIXAS has 7 telescopes (each consisting of 27 nested Wolter optics) that focus onto the same big CCD chip (which is identical to one used in XMM). Don't expect first light until one month after launch, though: The satellite must outgas for a while before the cooled CCD can be turned on. (Based on a news conference in Bonn, Germany, on April 26th)

If the money does arrive, it could pay for up to a year's worth of Mir operations. Energia president Yuri Semionov said at a press conference on April 26 that the annual cost for operating Mir had fallen from $250 million to $100 million, primarily due to the devaluation of the Russian ruble. $100 million for a ticket is an amazing price: In 1990 a Japanese TV company paid $12 million to fly one its journalists on Mir for a week. A Moscow bank paid $10 million around the same time to pay for Britain's Helen Sharman to spend a week on the station. And such a sum was often quoted as the 'typical' price of a one week ticket to Mir, including a year's worth of basic training in Russia. (Space Views and BBC Online of April 27 etc.)